Guidelines for new platforms

Tumblr is one of the newest and fastest-growing platforms on the social media scene and is a good case study for how to evaluate social media to decide if you should participate. Criteria to consider:

Is it innovative, unique or a leader in format?

Does it have critical mass or growth potential?

Does it have or could it easily attract one of our audiences?

Can it provide a reasonable return on investment advancing our goals and messages?

Can we devote the required resources to it?

Based on professional judgment, interactive marketing professionals assess the immediate and long-term value of the social media property using these criteria. As part of that process, the person responsible for managing social media communication typically identifies and evaluates sites for potential engagement. That person accomplishes this by immersion in the social media beat, which is accomplished by subscribing to blogs, Twitter and online social media publications.

To provide some balance to the hype that can come with new media properties, use other resources to corroborate the attention. To that end, Marquette assesses a site or technology’s viability through some quantifiable measurement in the following ways:

Benchmark Web traffic of the site against marquette.edu. Sites with more traffic than marquette.edu represent a potential source for new traffic.

Benchmark traffic growth. Sites with rapidly increasing traffic represent a possible location where one of our audiences may gather in the future.

Benchmark Web traffic against similar Web properties in the same category. Sites that have the most traffic in their categories are a leading gathering place for an audience.

Verify an audience profile. Use polls and informal data collection to determine if some audience segment is familiar or engaged with a given site. Use audience profile tools such as Compete and Quantcast or media planning tools such as Google Ad Planner to determine if a site might match the demographic profile of one of our audiences.